The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Comedy fans have known and loved Jason Mantzoukas for years. Even if you don't know the name, you've probably known and loved Mantzoukas and recognized him from his scene-stealing roles FX's The League, or Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Drunk History, Transparent, I'm Sorry, No Activity, The Good Place, Big Mouth, or in movies such as The Dictator or The House. And you've certainly heard him as one-third of...

Anthony Cumia was installing heaters and air conditioners at 33 when a song parody he wrote about OJ Simpson caught the attention of a Long Island radio DJ named Gregg Hughes. Hughes invited Cumia to sit in with him, and from there, The Opie and Anthony Show was born. That was 1994. Twenty years later, SiriusXM fired Cumia after one ill-advised stunt and Tweetstorm too many, and ended the jock duo...

Orlando Leyba was born in Puerto Rico but deported to the Dominican Republic with his mother when he was just a small child. Leyba and his mom eventually made it back to the United States, and he got his start in comedy in Miami. Through hard work and timing, he's risen up the ranks, and in the past year, recorded stand-up for LaffMobb's Lafftracks on truTV, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,...

Carolyn Taylor, Jennifer Whalen and Aurora Browne met while performing with Second City Toronto. Later, Meredith MacNeill befriended Carolyn on the set of This Hour Has 22 Minutes . These four Canadian women joined forces to create, write, executive produce and Star in their own hilarious sketch comedy series, Baroness Von Sketch Show . They're in production on season four for the CBC, while seaso...

When real life becomes even more ridiculous than satire, then what role is there for comedians to play? And how should comedians talk about serious issues while still keeping their senses of humor? Those are two of the questions I posed to comedians on the front lines of the discussion, and on the red carpet of the Golden Probes, a satirical award ceremony mocking misogyny. Among the comedians I c...

You may or may not remember seeing J. Keith van Straaten in roles on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Gilmore Girls," "Beverly Hills, 90210," and ads for McDonald's, Nike, Pizza Hut, Cheez-It, and many more. But if you did, then you're just the sort of trivia expert who would have loved watching van Straaten host Comedy Central's TV game show "Beat The Geeks." He currently contributes to an NPR game show,...

Ted Alexandro has made multiple appearances on  David Letterman , Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel,  Craig Ferguson  and The View , had two half-hour specials on Comedy Central, and spent the past couple of years touring theaters and arenas around the world with Jim Gaffigan. He also is one of the co-founders of the New York Comedians Coalition, which successfully organized hundreds of comedians to neg...

Darrell   Hammond  started carving out a career for himself with voiceover work in central Florida after graduating from the University of Florida. More than a decade later, a chance Clinton impersonation during a performance at Carolines scored him his fateful third-times-the-charm audition for SNL in 1995. And more than two decades after that, he's still hanging around 30 Rock, now providing the...

Most people still think of Mary Lynn Rajskub as the counterterrorism techie Chloe from FOX's hit series 24 . But Rajskub has a long and storied comedy resume, from Mr. Show and Larry Sanders in the 1990s, to a prime time sketch TV effort with Kelsey Grammer in the 2000s, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Californication , to the movie Night School which opens this fall with Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish and many...

Maria Bamford is one of the most exciting stand-up comedians working today. You may have seen her starring in her own Netflix series, Lady Dynamite , based on her own life, or Target's holiday season TV commercials, based on your own. Bamford has been on the front lines of revolutionizing stand-up comedy, from The Comedians of Comedy Tour with Patton Oswalt, to performing for her parents in The Sp...

Mo Mandel is a stand-up comedian who created and executive produces Comedy Knockout for truTV, where comics zing each other and try to win over the studio audience. Before that, he hosted truTV's BARmageddon and appeared more than 40 times on the panel of Chelsea Lately. You've seen him as a co-star on such TV series as Modern Family, Castle and Happy Endings, on his own in a half-hour Comedy Cent...

Sam Morril is one of the fastest rising-rising stand-up comics in NYC, having just come off hosting two seasons of  People Talking Sports  on the MSG network. Morril also has performed on America's Got Talent, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Conan, and Last Comic Standing . He's risen from Comedy Central's Comics to Watch to his own hour special on the network, premiering September 14, 2018. I...

Jonathan Katz won Comedy Central's first-ever Emmy Award for his critically-acclaimed animated series, Dr. Katz, in the mid-1990s. He followed that up with a Peabody Award in 1998. Twenty years later, he's entertaining us anew with therapy sessions with his famous funny friends in a brand-new Dr. Katz: The Audiobook, for Amazon's Audible. But before he ever began his comedy career, he led a wonder...

Elayne Boosler's comedy career began by working the door as the hostess at the original Improvisation club in New York City in the 1970s. For over forty years, she has appeared on seemingly every talk show ever on TV, has written and starred in five of her own one-hour Showtime standup comedy specials, written and directed two movies for Cinemax. She self-financed that first special, 1985's "Party...

Maeve Higgins was a bestselling memoirist and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the age of 31, she decided to move to America. So immigration isn't just the subject of her hit podcast, Maeve In America: Immigration IRL, but also a first-hand experience. She co-hosts Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk on National Geographic, as well as the weekly comedy showcase Butterboy in Brooklyn with Aparna...

Judd Apatow and Pete Holmes first met on a podcast, and ever since, have developed a wonderful working relationship. Holmes first pitched the idea for Crashing to Apatow on his late great TBS late-night show, and I caught up with both the stand-up comedian and the writer/director/producer on the set of HBO's Crashing at The Comedy Cellar, where they were filming an upcoming episode for the comedy'...

Zainab Johnson had other plans for her life, perhaps professional basketball or teaching, before a tragic accident changed her life and her worldview. Johnson tells me how she absorbed the lessons of the comedians she hung out with before jumping into comedy herself. So far, so good. After being named a New Face at Montreal's Just For Laughs Festival in 2014, she has appeared on HBO's All Def Come...

In 2011, Rafinha Bastos was named the most influential person on Twitter. Not then-President Barack Obama. Not the Pope. Brazilian comedian and TV personality Rafinha Bastos. Bastos has upward of 12 million Twitter followers now. He sat down with me during Montreal's Just For Laughs festival to talk about how his dreams shifted from journalism to basketball to comedy, how free speech isn't so free...

Paul  Mecurio  is seen every night by audiences of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert , as he warms them up before the CBS cameras turn on for taping.  Mecurio  graduated from law school and started out on Wall Street, though, before ever discovering his passions for comedy and getting a big break by selling a joke to Jay Leno.  Mecurio  has known Colbert for more than two decades, as he was one o...

Allan Havey  is a comedian and actor who hosted a late-night talk show for the Comedy Channel (before it was Comedy Central) called Night After Night with Allan Havey.  You might not have heard much from him in the 1990s and much of the 2000s. But he's certainly enjoying a renaissance in the past decade, since acting in the 2009 Steven Soderbergh film, The Informant! then continuing with appearanc...

This is a special edition of Last Things First, recorded live during Clusterfest 2018 in San Francisco. Comedy Central was kind enough to ask me to host a series of Clusterfest panels for the media that they called fireside chats. In this session, I welcomed the Roastmaster himself, Jeff Ross, and two-time Roast Battle runner-up Matt Broussard to talk about the art of roasting, the development of...

Sam Grittner is one of the best comedians on Twitter. Don't take my word for it? OK then how about Rolling Stone, Huffington Post and famous comedians such as Weird Al Yankovic, who are among the tens of thousands who follow him and have put him on best of lists in four of the past five years. Grittner also created the parody account @tonightongirls in 2013 and served as lead writer for Internet A...

Paula Poundstone started her comedy career in Boston in the late 1970s before taking her act and her life on the road to San Francisco. Poundstone broke through in a big way in 1984 when Robin Williams asked her to perform stand-up on the episode he guest hosted of Saturday Night Live. She would go on to film two comedy specials for HBO and one for Bravo, become the first woman to deliver the keyn...

This is a special edition of Last Things First, recorded live during Clusterfest 2018 in San Francisco. Comedy Central was kind enough to ask me to host a series of Clusterfest panels for the media that they called fireside chats. In this session, I welcomed Sasheer Zamata, Roy Wood Jr., and Mark Normand. We joked about whether comedians should ever apologize, about getting advice from comedians a...

Romesh Ranganathan was a math teacher before devoting his life to stand-up comedy in 2012. Since then, he has found great success in the UK, nominated for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, and with TV appearances on Live at the Apollo , many panel shows, and his own BBC series for two years, Asian Provocateur . For his next trick, Romesh came to America to see if he could duplicate hi...